Work begins on planned ICE detention facility near Gilroy, Calif., as Santa Clara County threatens lawsuit

Work is already underway at the site of a planned ICE detention facility just outside Gilroy, setting up a legal and political fight between Santa Clara County and the federal government over what could become Northern California’s newest link in the federal government’s expanded deportation system.

“It’s the federal government building an infrastructure for terror,” Santa Clara County counsel Tony LoPresti said at a news conference Thursday in San Jose at the Santa Clara County Government Center.

LoPresti vowed to file the “best and strongest lawsuit” against the project, which he called “an attack on the immigrant community and … an attack on Santa Clara County.”

ICE and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE, did not immediately respond to questions about the facility, any plans it may have for detainment and deportations in the Bay Area, or the local officials’ criticism.

Federal government leasing documents show the project at 7240 Holsclaw Road is an ICE facility. It would need a “sally port” big enough “to accommodate a large passenger bus,” the documents said.

Gilroy Mayor Greg Bozzo said work at the site started about a week and a half ago.

County zoning laws for the site of the planned center do not allow for detention centers or any type of facility that holds or imprisons people, LoPresti said.

In an interview Thursday, LoPresti said the federal government “might be trying to move forward without any kind of permits” and “might argue, certainly, that it can take actions without any kind of local government approval.”

“We’re taking stock of the whole situation,” LoPresti said. “I wouldn’t say that we’re focusing on any one law or any one theory.”

Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office has been in contact with county officials and is “actively coordinating” with them on the case, LoPresti said. Bonta’s office said it was working with LoPresti’s office “to explore all available options.”

LoPresti said no effort had been made to alert the county or other local governments about the detention center project — first reported by San José Spotlight — on land dedicated to agriculture, warehouses and greenhouses.

The property is surrounded by wire fencing about eight feet tall covered by dark fabric mesh, with a handful of workers in bright-orange shirts on site Thursday. One of the workers said he didn’t know the nature of the project, but that he and the other workers were fixing up the property.

The planned South Bay facility comes as the Trump administration accelerates its national deportation campaign, increasing pressure on an immigration detention system with limited capacity in Northern California.

Early on in Trump’s second term, experts including UC Berkeley public policy professor Caitlin Patler identified the lack of detention centers in Northern California as a potential roadblock to his mass deportation plans. ICE’s San Francisco field office, which in addition to Northern California oversees Hawaii, Guam and Saipan, has four detention centers in its infrastructure, all located in central and southern California: the California City Detention Facility, the Central Valley Annex in McFarland, the Golden State Annex in McFarland and the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center in Bakersfield.

Federal records show the General Services Administration in December 2020, near the end of Trump’s first term, published an initial notice that it was seeking to lease a property for a 4,000-square-foot “detention center” somewhere between San Jose and Gilroy, for 20 years. While the first notice included an “occupancy date” of Sept. 1, 2023 — close to three years after the notice was issued — the most recent notice, issued in August 2024 under former President Joe Biden, noted that the occupancy date was to be determined.

The federal government in January 2025 awarded the lease to a Beverly Hills company named ECG 6 LLC in a $27 million contract for the property at 7240 Holsclaw Road, federal records show. The 25-acre parcel, which county records show was bought by ECG 6 around the same time of the lease award, lies just east of Highway 101 and the Gilroy city limits, and just north of Highway 152.

California Secretary of State data show lease recipient ECG 6’s address in Beverly Hills matches the address of Elmwood Capital Group, a real estate company founded in 2020 whose website says it acquires industrial facilities and procures leases with the federal government’s General Services Administration. The company did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Santa Clara County Supervisor Sylvia Arenas, whose region includes Gilroy, said that the county and community will stand together “in planned and coordinated action to protect and support our immigrant community” and against the creation of an ICE facility.

Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren, whose district includes the detention center site, assailed “poor conditions” in ICE facilities.

“It’s absolutely ridiculous that Republicans in Washington are throwing tens of billions of dollars at ICE to build these detention centers and terrorize communities, all while they ignore the financial stress Americans are facing,” Lofgren said Thursday.

Elsewhere in the Bay Area, lawmakers and activists have expressed concerns that the federal government may convert the former FCI Dublin women’s prison, which shuttered in 2024, into an ICE detention facility. Federal officials were spotted at the prison site last year, prompting speculation that the government could have its eyes on it as a location to detain migrants as part of Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Whether any connection exists between the Dublin and Gilroy sites in the Trump administration’s detention-facilities plans was unclear.

ICE enforcement in the Bay Area and Trump’s threats of mass deportations have prompted dozens of protests in the Bay Area since he returned to office last year, from Bay Area-wide demonstrations to student walkouts.

For Berenice Hernandez of Gilroy, who works with young people, the federal records and legal arguments point to something more immediate: a planned ICE facility just outside the community she calls home.

“I feel like my community is a safe space, and they’re interrupting that,” Hernandez said. “It’s literally in our backyard.”